Politicsweb has challenged the conclusion that the data needed to calculate a farm murder rate simply doesn’t exist by producing its own fact-check – complete with previously unseen data. But there are questions about where these numbers come from, and whether they’re credible.

In South Africa, few subjects elicit as much debate and opinion as the country’s extensive social welfare programme. Does it indeed make people “lazy” and “dependent”? And is South Africa heading for a financial cliff because of it? We reviewed the research.

In an open letter to the South African president, one of the country’s big labour unions and an organisation representing African migrant communities called for the identification of areas where xenophobic attacks might occur. Migration expert Alexandra Hiropoulos introduces Xenowatch, a project aiming to provide the building blocks to do that.

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We hold public figures accountable

For democracy to function, public figures need to be held to account for what they say. The claims they make need to be checked, openly and impartially. Africa Check is an independent, non-partisan organisation which assesses claims made in the public arena using journalistic skills and evidence drawn from the latest online tools, readers, public sources and experts, sorting fact from fiction and publishing the results.